Wednesday, 28 March 2012

Bush Food - Farmers Cheese

Davy has been giving off saying we don't put enough recipes on the blog and I sort of agree, food is one of the 4 essential elements after all. So we are going to do a series on bush food. The theme will be that the recipes will be tradtional mountain man/pioneer recipes or they will incorporate a wild ingredient somewhere or just be plain simple campfire cooking, we will spread them out over the year.

I remember reading about this method of making cheese in a book on mountain men many years ago in which it said they often used goats or buffalo milk and I wondered how they actually got to milk a buffalo?

because of this I sort of neglected the idea until I saw Tam Wendel﻿ on Bushcraft on Fire doing it and I thought I'd better give it a go!

so essential ingredients are

Milk

Vinegar

(that's it! although it's a bland cheese so I flavoured mine with wild garlic and black pepper)

﻿put the milk in the pan and heat it till it's nearly boiling (but don't let it boil!)

Take it off the heat and ﻿add about 50ml of vinegar to every 2 quarts of milk, stir it as it separates

﻿Strain it through one of Cody Lundin's bandanas

﻿after half an hour you have a ball of lovely soft spreading cheese, if you want a firm cheese then there's one more step after adding any flavours

press the cheese into a mold or a bowl , cover with the bandana and add a weight on top to compress it and refrigerate for 2 hours, and there you have it﻿, home made Bushcrafters Wild Garlic and Black Pepper Cheese. Goes lovely on crackers or just as a snack..if this is pioneer food, then I like it!

4 comments:

Yay! I'm so excited. I LOVE recipes. I have been hearing so much lately about how fermented foods (mostly obtained by salting) are supposedly very good for you in a lot of ways, and when I get moved into my new place this week, I'm going to do a lot of experimenting on making some of those things "my own self." Never made cheese before, although I am very comfortable in a kitchen. Goody for your decision to show us your recipes in action!